Amorous History Lesson

Cecile Pineda Uses A Peruvian Bawd And `A Satirically Feminine Eye` To Send Up `the Manners, Mores And Literature Of All The

Americas`

March 08, 1992|By Reviewed by Richard Martins, a novelist who often writes about Latin America.

The Love Queen of the Amazon

By Cecile Pineda

Little, Brown, 255 pages, $19.95

Bay of All Saints and

Every Conceivable Sin

By Ana Miranda

Viking, 305 pages, $21

The passionate backdrop of South America has produced some of modern literature`s most remarkable female characters: Vargas Llosa`s tantalizing Aunt Julia, Garcia Marquez`s iron-willed Fermina Diaz and Jorge Amado`s sultry Dona Flor.

In her third novel, ``The Love Queen of the Amazon,`` Cecile Pineda enhances this roster with a brilliantly drawn portrait of a Peruvian bawd, Ana Magdalena Figueroa. She is one of the few great Latin heroines not created by the male imagination, and Ana Magdalena`s amorous history provides a unique vehicle for the U.S.-born Pineda to look with a satirically feminine eye at the manners, mores and literature of all the Americas, to which ``Love Queen`` is a noteworthy addition.

In the Amazonian backwater of Malyerba (``Weed``), back when ``Potholes had not been invented (and) ruts were in plentiful supply,`` a woman so dour she`s known as ``The Pickle`` delivers a daughter while asleep in her bathtub. This circumstance of birth comes into play when Ana`s innate aquatic skills

(young ladies were never taught to swim) result in her banishment from convent school: Ana had hurled herself into the river to save a friend from drowning but was expelled because she emerged from it naked.

Ana longs for the handsome boatman Sergio Ballado, but family finances force her betrothal to a celebrated but fatuous writer, Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz. If nothing about the courtship goes well-the don`s present of flowers, including a Venus Flytrap Gigantea, attracts swarms of bees to the Figueroa house-their wedding is an antic disaster that culminates in Ana Magdalena`s kidnapping by the convicts her husband had hired as caterers. But, in the ribald tradition that dates to ``Fanny Hill,`` Ana saves her own day and escapes to La Nymphaea, a famous brothel run by her grandaunt Ofelia, and into the arms of Sergio, to whom she surrenders her pre-verified virginity.

With her husband locked in his upstairs room to endlessly work and rework his novel, for which his wife`s fast-changing life soon becomes grist, the sexually awakened Ana returns to La Nymphaea, where her true calling surfaces. Soon after, she turns her parlor into a house of her own. But after Don Federico interrupts the festivities by descending the staircase with manuscript in hand, Ana decides to build a majestic establishment called La Confiteria (the candy store) where ``inventive specialties for discriminating tastes`` are supplied to an elite clientele.

Eventually, everyone wants a share of Ana`s action-the local police chief, the dictator called El Magnifico, even the gringos` International Financial Fund (IFF), which purports to offer Ana economic aid but only hopes to pillage her profits. Such pressures are enough to force Ana to unload her Confiteria to Cardinal Catafalco, the papal nuncio, for five times its gross, plus an annulment from Don Federico and the beatification of her mother, who was found crystallized in the bee honey she`d been collecting to support herself. And Ana is off again, swimming in the fast currents of the river that runs through her extraordinary life.

It is to Pineda`s credit that ``The Love Queen`` can be read and enjoyed on many levels. It is an uproarious sex farce that looks without leering at the appetites and foibles of both genders. It is a feminist work, too, that uses the macho ethic of Latin America to dramatize the servility forced upon females in many lands. It is satirically anti-clerical as well, presenting an inept and self-serving Church that does little to help the impoverished people of poor lands. Finally, ``The Love Queen`` is a modern allegory that attacks the sin of vice in its two most rampant forms-those of greed and oppression, which are as often sexual as they are economic.

Brazilian novelist Ana Miranda takes a far different approach in looking at the violence and oppression that plague her homeland-ironically the only major South American nation that did not have to fight a bloody war of independence (a decree separated it from Portugal in 1822).

Miranda looks far back in history to search out the genesis of Brazil`s current dilemmas. ``Bay of All Saints and Every Conceivable Sin`` is set in 1683 in the coastal city of Bahia (now officially Salvador). A brutal war with the Dutch was over, as was the worst of the Spanish Inquisition. Brazil, she writes, ``was the image of paradise. Yet demons prowled there, luring souls to hell.``